Lgbtq

Based on a remark of a friend about preconceptions we have with regard to gender I started looking more carefully at how I use gender pronouns. Though I’m usually fairly diligent in writing I noticed I failed entirely in speech. This usually happens to me when I meet a new person because at that point I have no context to go on. My autopilot takes over and based on their physique, dress style and preconceptions around gender that have been drilled into me for over 20 years, I end up selecting a pronoun like “he” or “she”.

If you’re following me through social media it won’t have escaped your attention that my avatar turned rainbow and there was a distinct increase in rainbows throughout my feed as we were ramping up to Pride. Many people outside the LGBTQ community and even quite a few within don’t realise the importance of Pride and just see it as a shameless parade. It is far from that. After having helped organise our participation at Pride this year a few colleagues and I wrote a piece on the intranet about why we participated and what we did.

Last night Europe went to war. No the Germans didn’t start it, we were just having a huge music contest followed by some political voting to decide who should win. I adore the Eurovision Song Contest It might not be a manly thing to admit to but it’s one of those things that just gets me ridiculously, over the rainbow to the moon, happy. It’s also been a fairly progressive contest with LGBTQ members participating and people in drag aren’t unfamiliar to the Eurovision either.

After my post on LGBTQ in tech a lot of people reached out to me, thanking me for the post, with a lot of kind words and some even with a resounding “yes that’s me too”. It’s been heartwarming to see the support this story gathered and how the Puppet community, which is the one I interact with the most, reacted to it. Interestingly though some have raised the point that LGBTQ are not a minority in tech.

Most people who know me know I’m gay, or that I identify as gay or queer or whichever way you’re more comfortable phrasing or thinking about it. To put it bluntly: I like men, I date men, I sleep with men, I happen to be a man and it’s all good. The thing that struck me about tech when I started getting more involved in online communities is that no one cared about this fact.